Trip hammer
In ancient China, the trip hammer evolved out of the use of the mortar and pestle, which in turn gave rise to the treadle-operated tilt-hammer (Chinese: 碓 Pinyin: dui; Wade-Giles: tui).
[1] The latter was a simple device employing a lever and fulcrum (operated by pressure applied by the weight of one's foot to one end), which featured a series of catches or lugs on the main revolving shaft as well.
[3] The latter book states that the legendary mythological king known as Fu Xi was the one responsible for the pestle and mortar (which evolved into the tilt-hammer and then trip hammer device).
Although the author speaks of the mythological Fu Xi, a passage of his writing gives hint that the waterwheel and trip-hammer were in widespread use by the 1st century AD in China (for water-powered Chinese metallurgy, see Du Shi): Fu Hsi invented the pestle and mortar, which is so useful, and later on it was cleverly improved in such a way that the whole weight of the body could be used for treading on the tilt-hammer (tui), thus increasing the efficiency ten times.
[4] In his Rou Xing Lun, the government official Kong Rong (153–208 AD) remarked that the invention of the trip hammer was an excellent example of a product created by intelligent men during his own age (comparing the relative achievements of the sages of old).
[4] During the 3rd century AD, the high government official and engineer Du Yu established the use of combined trip hammer batteries (lian zhi dui), which employed several shafts that were arranged to work off one large waterwheel.
[11] The recumbent hammer was found in Chinese illustrations by 1313 AD, with the publishing of Wang Zhen's Nong Shu book on ancient and contemporary (medieval) metallurgy in China.
Lewis, a flute player whose mechanism was described by the Persian Banū Mūsā brothers in the 9th century AD and can be "reasonably" attributed to Apollonius of Perge, functions on the principle of water-powered trip hammers.
[18] The Roman scholar Pliny (Natural History XVIII, 23.97) indicates that water-driven pestles had become fairly widespread in Italy by the first century AD: The greater part of Italy uses an unshod pestle and also wheels which water turns as it flows past, and a trip-hammer [mola]".While some scholars have viewed this passage to mean a watermill,[19] later scholarship argued that mola must refer to water-powered trip hammers which were used for the pounding and hulling of grain.
[16] At the Italian site of Saepinum excavators have recently unearthed a late antique water mill that may have employed trip hammers for tanning, the earliest evidence of its kind in a classical context.
[24][25] The widest application of trip hammers seems to have occurred in Roman mining, where ore from deep veins was first crushed into small pieces for further processing.
[26] Here, the regularity and spacing of large indentations on stone anvils indicate the use of cam-operated ore stamps, much like the devices of later medieval mining.
[26][14] Such mechanically deformed anvils have been found at numerous Roman silver and gold mining sites in Western Europe, including at Dolaucothi (Wales), and on the Iberian peninsula,[26][14][27][28] where the datable examples are from the 1st and 2nd century AD.
[29] At Dolaucothi, these trip-hammers were hydraulic-driven and possibly also at other Roman mining sites, where the large-scale use of the hushing and ground sluicing technique meant that large amounts of water were directly available for powering the machines.
[10] The well-known Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci often sketched trip hammers for use in forges and even file-cutting machinery, those of the vertical pestle stamp-mill type.
